By Meredith Hayden
Meat

Buffalo Wing Style Chicken Thighs

February 7, 2024

I LOVE a chicken wing, but often I find they lack a very key component: chicken. Unless you’re buying huge monster-sized chicken wings, which honestly give me the creeps because god knows what they did to those poor chickens to make them get that big, you’re left with a lot of chicken skin with a side of chicken meat. Thus, I present to you my chicken wing-style baked chicken thighs. They’ve got the crispy chicken skin that you love so much in a wing, they’re doused in butter buffalo, lemon pepper, and or chili garlic sauce, but with lots more tender juicy chicken. What’s not to love!?

I feel it is sacrilegious to eat these with a fork and knife. Do the dish justice and pick it up with your hands and dunk them in some homemade ranch and a sidecar of your wing sauce of choice. Serve this with a pile of crisp and crunchy veg and ladies and gentlemen we’ve got ourselves a meal.

Water is the enemy of flavor (sometimes).

This recipe takes you through a pretty thorough process of preparing our chicken for the oven. The reason is, we want crispy chicken skin. Since we are not frying the chicken, we must use science to give us that fried chicken skin crunch. The enemy of crunch: moisture because moisture = steam. So we must remove as much moisture from the chicken skin as possible. What repels moisture? Salt.

Salting the chicken skin will draw out the moisture, giving you extra crispy skin. Pre-salting the flesh side will allow the salt to penetrate the chicken rather than just sit on the outside giving you juicy and flavorsome chicken meat. We will also be using the fridge to continue our quest for crispy skin. Our fridges have fans that remove water vapor to create cold dry air, the optimal environment for preserving the shelf life of food. So, by putting the chicken in the fridge uncovered, all of that moisture on the surface will evaporate thanks to our handy dandy fridge fans. Which gives us dry chicken that will soon become the crispy chicken skin of your dreams. 

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Buffalo Wing Style Chicken Thighs

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Ingredients

for the thighs
  • 6-8 bone in skin on chicken thighs
  • kosher salt
  • olive oil
calabrian chili garlic sauce
  • 2 tbsp butter melted
  • 2 tbsp chopped Calabrian chilis
  • 1 clove garlic finely grated
  • ¼ cup fresh chopped parsley
  • zest from 1 lemon
classic buffalo sauce
  • 2 tbsp butter melted
  • ¼ cup hot sauce
  • optional: 1 tsp or more of cayenne for extra spicy

Instructions

 
  • Prep the thighs: Remove them from the packaging and pat dry with paper towel. Loosen any extra chicken skin folded under the thigh. Generously salt all over the skin and flesh side. Place the thighs skin side up on a wire rack lined sheet pan skin side up (keep extra skin unfolded on the rack facing up as well). Transfer to the fridge uncovered for 1 hour or overnight if you can.  Remove from the fridge and allow the chicken to sit at room temp for about 15 min before cooking.
  • Preheat your oven to 400 degrees. Line a sheet tray with foil and a wire rack. Pat the chicken dry with paper towel and dust off any excess salt. Place skin side down in a cold pan, preferably stainless steel or cast iron. Heat the pan over medium low. Add a tbsp of oil and let the chicken cook undisturbed for 7 minutes. Check for browning and rotate the pan if some pieces are browning faster than others. Cook on the skin side until all of the pieces are a deep golden brown.
  • Transfer the chicken to the foil and wire rack lined sheet pan. If you would like to season your chicken with dry seasonings, do so after this step.Transfer the chicken to the oven and cook for 45 min. While the chicken cooks, prepare your wing sauce of choice.
  • For the Calabrian Chili Garlic sauce: melt butter in a small sauce pan on low heat. Add your grated garlic and Calabrian chilis, stir and cook on low for a few minutes. Turn off the  heat. Add the lemon zest, chopped parsley and a pinch of salt.
  • For the Buffalo:  simply whisk together the melted butter and hot sauce. Taste and adjust to your preference.
  • Toss the cooked wings in your wing sauce and serve with a side of extra wing sauce.

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What do you think of this recipe?

Can you post the ranch recipe?! Dying to try that with these thighs!

Just made this tonight (I’ve been making a lot of your recipes lately ha) and it was so good! I didn’t have the time to prep the chicken for 1-24 hour so I just salted them for the 15 minutes while they came to room temperature and the skin still turned out really crispy! I have an electric stove so the first step of browning the skin took me about 20 minutes from a cold pan on the 3 setting. Chicken was perfectly 165° degrees after 45 minutes in the oven. And I cooked the chicken in my Dutch oven. Served with homemade ranch and chopped carrots, cucumbers, and celery. Doubled the Buffalo sauce for 2 lbs of chicken quarters (thighs plus legs). Definitely will make this again!